Introducing
Kris Tompkins
"I’m very proud to be a Matriarch of The Great Elephant Migration. Audacious and exceptional voices who incite fierce protection of wildness not only around single species but for all life are lacking around the world.
Every category we humans use to communicate with one another is essential and art and scale are both powerful and impossible to ignore. These giant, beautiful beings touring the world speak louder and more profoundly than any orator or activist can possibly be.
Their texture speaks of their home territories, they speak of the Indigenous communities who are the guardians of so many wild areas that are left on earth today. It's my firm belief that we are long past the time when electing to abdicate our futures is a choice. Sitting on the sidelines and wringing our hands is not action nor is it acceptable.
No matter where you are, what you do, there is a role for you to step up to the long front of people around the world who choose health, beauty and life - this is the message the March of the Great Elephants brings to us so clearly."
Kristine McDivitt Tompkins is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, an American conservationist, and former CEO of Patagonia, Inc. For three decades, she has committed to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity by creating national parks, restoring wildlife, inspiring activism, and fostering economic vitality as a result of conservation.
Kristine and her late husband Douglas Tompkins have protected approximately 14.8 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina through Tompkins Conservation and its partners, making them among the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in history. Through Tompkins Conservation and its offspring organizations, Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile, she has helped to create or expand 15 national parks in Argentina and Chile, including two marine national parks, and works to bring back species that have gone locally or nationally extinct, such as the jaguar, red-and-green macaw, and giant river otters in Northeast Argentina, and Darwin’s rheas and extremely endangered huemul deer in Chile.
Kristine served as Patron for Protected Areas for the UN Environmental Programme from 2018-2022. The recipient of numerous honors, she was the first conservationist to be awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. Her 2020 TED Talk, "Let's Make the World Wild Again," has over two million views.
